Eeva-Leena Eklund: Things

In her second exhibition at Galerie Anhava, **Eeva-Leena Eklund** fills the canvases with her rich visual language – lush floral still lifes, disarmingly expressive animal figures, giant violets, and near-abstract paintings of spheres, scarves and candy pizzas, all brimming with joy and life. While preparing the exhibition, Eklund has at times found herself looking back to the path that has led to this moment, to the works painted along the way, and to her ever-growing archive, part of which now spills into the gallery as a vast, wall-sized assemblage of objects and paintings. Eklund's practice is rooted in cycles and layering: her paintings can refer to recurring motifs, to everyday objects and things tinged with nostalgia, and to one another. In her exhibitions, the works often fall into associative chains and sequences, or form walk-in installations in the manner of **Schwitters**' _Merzbau_. This time, the artist's archive of objects, postcards, souvenirs, and photographs is arranged in orderly rows across the wall, forming a grid in which each object and painting has its own place, like on a page from a **Richard Scarry** picture book. Chosen on purely personal and subjective grounds, the non-hierarchical display resembling a cabinet of curiosities, challenges patriarchal notions of what is deemed worthy of preserving and exhibiting. Eklund's practice is in fact characterised by the rejection of many artistic conventions, such as seeming suitability of subject matter or restrained and conventional composition, and by a deliberate, feminist subversion of norms. Eklund's pizza toppings and labyrinths of scarfs are strewn with glossy cherries, blueberries, flowers, and liquorice, hearts and checkered patterns. Here and there the paintings are sprinkled with confetti-like specs and floating, hazy spheres coming into focus or dissolving into the background, setting the paintings into motion. Scarf paintings constitute also an archive of their own in the work _29 Scarves_, where a deliciously colourful array of striped, chequered, and polka-dot scarves flutters across a page of squared paper, pieced together like a patchwork quilt. Pastel softness and unrestrained exuberance of colour, humour and gravity, everyday grey and luminous orange, the wild and the contemplated, the universal and the intensely personal – in these works, everything holds true at once and in parallel. Two-channel video work _<3_ installed as a diptych in the basement floor, draws on diary-like moments saved on the artist's phone, with glimpses of the fleeting magic of everyday life recurring in parallel, uninterrupted streams. Wind gently stirring a lilac bush or a door curtain, bubbles dancing and rising in a glass, a child seen through the window, playing in the snow: capturing these moments on camera, freezes time and turns a personal, elusive memory into something fixed, a shimmering testament to everyday life. – Aleksandra Oilinki